Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

Later Baranof boasted that Chris Storm could pilot a float plane, drive a car, mush a team of nine huskies, paddle a skin boat, handle an outboard motor, cut up a seal with an ulu and mix the best sourdough pancakes in Baranof. Only this last accomplishment made her the envy of the town's more solid citizens. She had inherited her sourdough starter from Thor, who had originally come by it from a prospector on one of his Far North journeys. Melting, feather-light, delectable, the golden circlets were a more potent asset than all of Christine's more spectacular activities. She had shot a polar bear, helped pull in a beluga white whale, caught king salmon. She could knit and wear a sweater expertly. In her second and last Baranof college year Chris appeared at the final big dance in a slinky black strapless dress. The effect, with all that blondeur, was devastating.

Chris Storm is Alaska. She's the granddaughter of the two most notorious men in the city of Baranof, and probably the whole territory: Czar Kennedy, the business magnate responsible for the towering "Ice Palace," and Thor Storm, a Norwegian immigrant and newspaperman whose hardiness exemplifies the pioneer spirit. These men, with their opposing ideas of what Alaska should be, are long rivals, brought together by the romance of their children and the birth of Chris. As a result, Chris comes to represent both the pioneer spirit and the cutting edge of Alaska's future. She boasts that, as her mother was dying in childbirth, she was placed into the carcass of a caribou to keep warm--a real Alaskan birth.

Edna Ferber's Ice Palace was published in 1958, a year before the territory of Alaska earned its statehood. Territorial issues are at the heart of the novel: when it opens, a sinister business associate of Czar's is scheming to have his son Bay made governor of the territory, a position that might be a springboard to the role of Senator--from the state of Washington. Chris and Thor are believers that only statehood can fully guarantee independence and self-sufficiency for Alaska, which suffers from (as they see it) the importation of labor from "Outside." Ice Palace is familiar stuff for Ferber, who wrote similar books about the "larger-than-life" cultures of Texas, in Giant, and Oklahoma, in Cimarron. Ice Palace, in fact, might be read as a kind of update to Cimarron, about a pioneer territory hurtling toward full statehood, except it remains, for Alaska, still a future promise.

I'm OK with Ferber's own brand of pulp propaganda, but Ice Palace, unfortunately, stinks as a novel. It was Ferber's last book, and you can sort of see her narrative power leaving her behind. The novel spins and spins, setting up the competition between Thor and Czar, but never really figuring out what to do with either of them. Ferber insinuates over and over that Chris' "Alaskan-ness" promises her a role in the future of the territory--or state--but what that might be, the novel really has no idea. There's a suggestion that being Bay's wife is not enough for either Chris or Alaska, but the character remains all promise and no execution; it feels like Ferber spends the whole time setting up a novel that never really gets started.

The best part, I thought, was the visit to an "Eskimo" village on the Bering Sea, part of a months-long exploration of the territory that Thor wants to be a kind of education to Chris before she leaves to go to college "Outside." Chris is drawn to a handsome part-Inuit pilot named Ross, who offers a kind of alternative to Bay--a real Alaskan, rather than an imported power-grabber from Outside. Ferber's books all have a kind of "unwoke woke" quality to them, full of racial stereotypes but a larger message of American syncretism and cosmopolitanism, and the Inuit village is the only place where Ferber's image of Alaska feels really convincing. It's a site of tradition and continuity in a territory that's rapidly changing. Though Chris boasts of being born in a caribou, much of what Ferber spends her time doing is emphasizing how modern this Alaska is, how it has bowling alleys and cinemas and debutante balls and all the other stuff that makes it worthy of being American.

Two Old Women by Velma Wallis

On their way back to the camp, Sa' heard something skitter lightly along the bark of a tree. She stood very still, motioning her friend to do the same. Both women strained to hear the sound once more in the silence of the night. On a tree not far from them, silhouetted in the now-silvery moonlight, they saw an adventurous tree squirrel. Sa' slowly reached to her belt for the hatchet. With her eyes on the squirrel and her movements deliberately slow, she aimed the hatchet toward this target that represented survival. The animal's small head came up instantly and as Sa' moved her hand to throw, the squirrel darted up the tree. Sa' foresaw this, and, aiming a little higher, ended the small animal's life in one calculating throw with skill and hunting knowledge that she had not used in many seasons.

In Alaska, a band of Athabascans are struggling with the onset of winter. Without enough food to go around, and few opportunities to hunt, they make a difficult decision: to abandon two burdensome old women. Not only are the old women--Sa', meaning Star, and Ch'idzigyaak, meaning Chickadee--unable to contribute to the band's survival, they are always griping and complaining. Still, their children and grandchildren are among those who must move on as the old women are left in the snow, certainly to starve or freeze to death. But then, left to their own devices, the two old women decide they must commit themselves to their own survival, activating long-dormant lessons about how to hunt and survive in the difficult Alaskan winter, and soon they find themselves with a new passion for old ways.

Alaska Native writer frames Two Old Women as a story told to her when she was a girl, and it has the simplicity and straightforwardness of an instructive tale for children. By the time the band returns to their former hunting grounds, the situations have reversed: it is the women who have stored a cache of dried fish that they are generous to share with the larger band, who have only continued to struggle. The lesson is two-fold: one, in such difficult conditions, each member of the band must work together, and no one can be left behind; those you believe to be a burden may turn out to be an asset. It's easy to see how such a lesson, passed down from generation to generation, would provide important guidance for a culture that lives in some of the harshest conditions known to man. But the other lesson is that the old ways must not be forgotten: once Sa' and Ch'idzigyaak are abandoned, it is traditional methods of hunting and shelter-building that turn out to be their saving grace, and it is perhaps no coincidence that they are elders, who are meant to be repositories of old wisdom and knowledge.

As literature, Two Old Women isn't much. It has a pleasing clarity of voice, and honed but simple language that well reflects the nature of the story, as well as the landscape. It's most interesting, perhaps, as a reflection of the difficult choices made by those living traditionally in the Alaskan interior, and the way these communities prosper and thrive even in conditions that seem, to us down here, entirely unliveable.

Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman

At Whitehorse and even before Whitehorse, I was unsettled. I was not right. This is a condition that many people experience after arriving in Alaska. Nothing here is fixed, nothing is any better. Where is there left to go, except out of your mind?

OK, last Alaska book. The stories in Leigh Newman's 2022 collection Nobody Gets Out Alive all take place in her native Alaska, sometimes in the seedy strip malls of Anchorage, and sometimes in the not-so-distant wilderness, tinged with danger, but still accessible to upper middle class Anchoragites who have access to their Super Cub light aircraft. Many of the stories are related, centering on a group of Anchorage friends and their children, all of whom pass various traumas back and forth like chicken pox. These stories revolve around, as best as I can tell, a single and significant adulterous affair that destabilizes friendships and families.

But the truth is, I couldn't really make sense of them. I found myself going back and forth from story to story, trying to figure out whether the character from story Y was the same as the character from story X, trying to see how the pieces fit. Then again, even when I made the connection easily--Yes, I see that the bossy adult Jamie of "The Valley of the Moon" is the same as the beleaguered child on a rafting trip in "High Jinks"--the knowledge did nothing for me. I had the feeling, instead, of a collection of stories revolving around a great absence; in their insistence on dealing with the margins and the fallout rather than the thing itself it seemed to me that the stories had an emptiness at the middle of them. What am I supposed to get out of the "blue bear," a stuffed hunting trophy whose fur is discolored by glacial water or perhaps a blueberry diet, and which the older generation of Anchoragites steal or pass back and forth according to their wounded egos and jealousies? The symbolism of it stands out bright and clear, but the deeper feelings it symbolizes were lost on me.

So, I had a lot of trouble with these. Even on an individual level, I struggled to incorporate the significance of details, or make sense of the way people behaved. If the connection between adult Jamie and kid Jamie was lost on me, it was almost more disorienting to see characters who were the same but clearly not meant to be the same people, as in the troublesome autistic children at the heart of "Alcan, an Oral History" and "Slide and Glide." But certain themes did become clear to me. Mostly, these stories seem to suggest that, despite one's hope for a deeper connection to nature, or to wilderness and raw human spirit, Alaska is no different than anyplace else. "Nothing here is fixed," as Maggie writes in "Alcan, an Oral History," "nothing is any better." The families of the interrelated stories are known to one another because they own cabins on a place called Diamond Lake, which is the staging ground for the rafting trip of "High Jinks" and the crosscountry ski trip of Slide and Glide, each perhaps undergone heedless of the risk toward the youngest children who participate. And in each case these trips do bring out raw truths--enmities laid on the table, loveless marriages lade bare--and yet they don't allow anyone to move forward, or change, or understand themselves any better.

The strongest story, I thought, was the longest, "Alcan, an Oral History," about several road trippers who are making urgent escapes from the Lower 48 to Alaska on the highway that runs from British Columbia and the Yukon into Alaska, and how their stories become interwoven. A poor agricultural student travels with a friend, whom she realizes for the first time comes from a rich but hateful household. An abused woman travels with her difficult children, away from one soured relationship toward another she knows is only doomed. The way that these stories come together, involving a Folger's coffee can full of cash, a souvenir vial of Alaskan gold, and a depressed waitress at a highway truck stop, is ludicrously convoluted, but for the first and only time in the collection, the overpacked narrative is given enough space on the page to develop naturally. Some of these characters will end up in Alaska, and some of them won't--I particularly liked the way that one of the ag school students becomes a famous outsider artist after whittling faces into the trees of a secluded forest--but whether they will or not seems immaterial to the lives they will end up living. Not, at least, in comparison to who ends up with the coffee can of cash.

Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes

Now the Deauville family is all but extinct. I am the last of the line and not a man but a woman. When I die--long years in the future, I assume, and of course in France--the Deauville family name, which is pronounced "dough-veal," will die as well. It is a family name that deserves extinction. It was a family of men, a family of confusion, a family in which women were at best only prized by horses, a conglomerate of men who did not know that between innocent and satyriasis there's little to choose, or who could not find it in themselves to bridge extremes. The question is what brought about the family ruin: the innocence that flowered in my father or the satyriasis that surged through the lives of my grandfather and great-grandfather? But they are one and the same, those false flourishes of manhood, and it is up to me to discover how and why it happens that lust and innocence are only two faces in the same pool, and to forgive if I can the Alaskan adventurer as I have long since forgiven the old womanizer in all his gleeful and crafty pursuit of women.

Sunny Deauville is the proprietor of Gamelands, the premier brothel of the Alaskan bush. Sex, she tells the reader, is her favorite word, "a nice word, a cute word, a tiny green snake stiff in the mouth." Johns--whom she calls "Willies"--come from all over to Gamelands, drawn by the advertisements of a stocking leg planted between antlers. But Sunny is planning to leave Gamelands and Alaska for France, because lately she has been tormented by dreams of her adventurer father, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the waters around Juneau many years before. Sunny's father, who calls himself, and insists on being called, Uncle Jake, even by his daughter, is a Connecticut-born socialite who absconded to Alaska after the stock market crash in 1929.

Much of the novel is taken up by Sunny's memories of Uncle Jake and his adventurous exploits. Arriving in Juneau in 1930, Uncle Jake remakes himself in the image of legendary Alaska adventurers like Joe Juneau and Carl Ben Eielson. No sooner does he plant his feet on the dock at Juneau than he's called on to assist in the air rescue of a hunting party ravaged by a bear. When he returns, he has with him not only the ravaged hunter but an unbelievable story of tracking and killing the enormous bear, whom he dubs "His Unholiness." Much more of the novel--perhaps too much more--is about Uncle Jake's exploits than Sunny's madameing: Uncle Jake intervenes in a domestic conflict between a Swedish settler and his indigenous wife; Uncle Jake helps a deaf couple from Connecticut begin a fox farming operation on a remote island; Uncle Jake scales an unclimbable wall in search of copper deposits.

But at times, Uncle Jake's legend outpaces his actual abilities: his interference in the domestic conflict gets the indigenous woman killed; his mine outfits fail; he drives his boat against a reef where it's stuck for a week. He has an uncanny knack for getting of danger, but which he only employs because he has an uncanny knack for getting into it. Though he has young Sunny's undying admiration, he ignores the fear and stress that the move to Alaska inflicts upon his wife Sissy until she's died of it. He is an adventurer in a particular kind of early 20th century chauvinist mode, like a British officer in India, paternalistic toward Indians, contemptuous toward the very wildness he seeks out, and completely without a sex drive. What Sunny calls his "innocence" is a kind of reaction against disorder, which takes in both the Alaskan wilds and human desires, both of which should be conquered, and when they can't, ignored.

Though there's not enough of adult Sunny and her life in the brothel, I was struck by a very strange episode, in which the madame Sunny is visited by a towering, scar-covered woman with the unlikely name of Martha Washington. "Marty" has a deep knowledge of Alaskan legends, which she speaks about at length, and though Sunny suspects at first that her encyclopedia-like recounting means that she's faking it, Marty turns out to be the real deal, her scars the evidence of a disfiguring bear attack. Marty, it seems, has arrived at Gamelands with two objectives. One, to steal Sunny's boyfriend Hank, and two, to convince her girls to quit their lives of indecent prostitution. Sunny considers the episode a kind of ambush by her father, symbolically reincarnated in a woman's body. Another ghost in a dream But the whole bit is so strange and unexplained, it seems to me the only evidence that this relatively straightforward book was written by the same author as The Beetle Leg, one of the most difficult books I've ever read.

There's a silly kind of anti-feminism to the Martha Washington character that reveals the novel's more outdated ideas about sex, I think. For one, I think it wants to make an easy comparison between wildness and sexuality that is rather stupid. Uncle Jake is a civilizing force, terrified of his own libido, but it is his daughter, Sunny, who really embraces the wilderness of human lust. Only a man could write that, I think, and only a man writing from a certain mid-to-late twentieth century vantage point. But despite that, I was totally captivated by the chauvinist Uncle Jake, and I loved the way the book manages to both offer up a crop of traditional adventure narratives and critique them. At its heart, I think Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade is a loving send-up of those stories, so masculine but sexless, like stories written for children. And I liked the complexity of Sunny's relationship with her father, with its twin threads of idolatry and hatred. Getting to see the grown-up Sunny was a little like seeing the daughter from The Man Who Loved Children grow up and find an identity outside her father's shadow.

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

"You can't do anything," I said. He looked at me, surprised. I had never spoken like this to him before, but I found that it was easy. The words were already formed and only had to be released. "You sure know how to talk, I said, "about the things you'll never do." I snatched the whole cold urn. "You wanted to leave her here, didn't you?"

I held the urn with two rigid hands as we stared at each other. He did not move. I dropped the lid to the mud and pulled out the dusty bag. It was knotted but came undone easily. It was intolerable to me that she had been kept inside this plastic; I hadn't known until now. My father watched as I held the bag by a corner and, with a hard flick, dumped everything out. I didn't want her in the water, I didn't want her washed away. I wanted her mired. Stuck here. The mudflats were hungry. They would take her, and they would keep her.

Let's read some books about Alaska.

Ten-year old Gavin lives with his family in the outskirts of Anchorage. His mother and father are immigrants from Taiwan, trying to piece together a life for their four children. When Gavin comes down with a dangerous case of meningitis, he falls into a coma for a week. When he comes out of it, he discovers that he has passed the illness onto his little sister Ruby, who has not survived. Ruby's death destabilizes the family, tearing them apart: His younger brother Natty continuously searches for the sister he's been told is "lost"; his older sister Pei-Pei starts calling herself "Paige" and distancing herself from her Taiwanese family. Mom becomes more cruel, Dad more aloof; in his distraction he botches the installation of a well, which poisons another young boy, and the family finds themselves on the brink of starvation.

One thing I liked about The Unpassing is how well it evokes a sense of place. Anchorage is not Denali. Though it's ringed by mountains, the city itself and its environs lie in a lowland bowl on the precipice of huge mudflats. It feels hemmed in and on the edge of some wildness; a quality that The Unpassing uses to great effect. I had a small kick of joy out of following their journey--when they are evicted from their house--down through Portage Glacier and the Kenai Peninsula, places I remember from visiting long ago. And the particular racial and cultural dynamics of being Taiwanese in this place are subtly wrought. It's never fully stated, but Lin gives the reader the sense that the father's racial identity marks him as an outsider in the legal case against him. As the mother describes it to Gavin, walking into the courtroom she recognizes that this place is not "for them," and that by walking in they have already lost.

The Unpassing is, perhaps at its heart, a story about repression: no one in the family is able to confront what has happened to Ruby, because they don't know how to talk to each other about it. Gavin is shocked to learn from his sister that Ruby's ashes are still in the house--he didn't even know she'd been cremated--and later, he slips away with his father to scatter them on the mudflats without the mother's knowledge. The shame and anger possessed by mother and father are buried deep behind spiky, resentful dialogue that is one of the novel's greatest strengths. But there's a sense that perhaps these things are buried too deeply: Gavin struggles with his own guilt over passing the meningitis to his sister, but for a first person narrative, we get remarkably little of Gavin's feelings, which are buried as deep, if not deeper, as his mother and father's. As a result, when the guilt does emerge, it can seem narratively incongruous: Where has this been the whole time?

The Unpassing both thrives on and suffers from a kind of prose style that is associated, in my mind, with MFA programs (and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, of which Lin is an alum) specifically. The language itself is crisp, crystalline, and the detail especially sharp. But the story gets easily lost in the detail, and the larger structure of the narrative, how the pieces fit together, gets obscured. Take, for example, a scene where Gavin's mother takes them to a cheap-o department store in Anchorage to replace their clothes, where Gavin gets in a fight with his siblings. There is a great subtlety here--we come to understand mom's penny-pinching as a reaction to their poverty--but no sense of whether things are different now than they were before Ruby died, or how Gavin feels about it. And at times I yearned for a more authentic ten-year old voice, or perhaps a more developed sense that an adult Gavin is speaking back through time.

Still, I enjoyed The Unpassing. Its cryptic and subtle qualities are its most frustrating, but also its most engaging. It's also just an honest story about a side of the United States that has not been seen, which rarely or never gets told, and which it tells with faithfulness and precision.

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

It is as though the land slowly works its way into the man and by virtue of its character eclipses these motives. The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce. It is not that the land is simply beautiful but that it is powerful. Its power derives from the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life. Its power flows into the mind from a realization of how darkness and light are bound together within it, and the feeling that this is the floor of creation.

One of the coolest places I have ever been is called Burnt Cape on the island of Newfoundland. It is a high hump of grey gravel and white cliffs, dotted with little orange flowers that grow close to the ground to protect themselves from cold temperatures and high winds; they grow nowhere else in the world. Burnt Cape is described as a piece of the Arctic emerging fifteen degrees of latitude below the arctic circle; there are signs that warn travelers that, in rare circumstances, polar bears travel here on spring ice floes. It's a tiny spot, relative to the real Arctic, but it impressed upon me how so stark and enigmatic a landscape can capture the imagination, and become the stuff of dreams.

Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams is about the Arctic landscape as it is, and how it is imagined. Lopez, whose extensive experiences with Arctic researchers from Baffin Bay in Alaska to the eastern reaches of Greenland shows through impressively, begins his book with chapters on the region's animal life: the musk ox, the polar bear, the narwhal. Though we have only lately come to pay close attention to these animals through scientific research, Lopez argues, we still know very little about them, and they continue to surprise us. Is it true, as the indigenous people of the Arctic claim, that you should leap from a polar bear's attack to its left, because they are all left-pawed? From there, Lopez moves onto chapters about ice and the landscape, and only at the end of the book, to people: the indigenous people who have lived there for millennia, and the latecomer Europeans who let their dreams run away them and largely shipwrecked into disaster. That's the way it should be, it seems--the people last, and the Europeans last of all.

A relatively educated contemporary reader might cringe at Lopez's use of the word "Eskimo," which is largely thought of these days as a slur (see the CFL team's recent name change to the Edmonton Elk). But that might obscure the tremendous sensitivity Lopez has toward the indigenous people of the Arctic, whose long tenure on the land has produced a knowledge of it that no European can reproduce. He makes a really simple, but somehow not obvious, point about about the difference between Western science and indigenous knowledge: Western science, with its emphasis on controlled experimentation, simply cannot reproduce the number of hours of observation that indigenous communities have devoted to the land in which they live. He gives a remarkably sober and thoughtful treatment of the various benefits and drawbacks of the two kinds of thinking, explaining, for instance, how Western science is better equipped to describe the migrations and entire life cycles of Arctic animals, whom the Inuit or Yupik only encounter during certain seasons. But compare this to the map drawn, by memory, of Cumberland Sound, by an indigenous man, with its many hundreds of tiny inlets.

The first Arctic explorers, Lopez describes, paid insufficient attention to the indigenous people of the Arctic, as they paid insufficient attention to the land itself. The doomed James Franklin of the HMS Terror might have wondered, for instance, why the Inuit are nomadic, or why they travel in small groups, when loading up his ship with hundreds of men and planning to overwinter in the Arctic when trapped in ice. The Arctic has always been a place of men's dreams, Lopez describes, and those who have lived there the best are those who are patient and observant enough to dare the impossible task of taking it on its own terms.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, so the sample size is small, but I think Arctic Dreams may be the best nature book I've ever read. Lopez certainly has a fiction writer's knack for description, and has a way of making the Arctic landscape, which seems to so many alienating and monotonous, come alive with color and light. He faithfully describes how "the winter face of a muskox, its unperturbed eye glistening in a halo of snow-encrusted hair, looks at you over a cataract of time, an image that has endured all the pulsations of ice," and how "at certain hours the land has the resolution of a polished diamond." I'm reminded of the tremendous descriptions in William Vollmann's The Rifles, but even then I'd have to admit that Lopez's Arctic makes Vollmann's seem drab and bereft.

Arctic Dreams was published in 1986; it sadly has the doomed quality of a letter written by someone who doesn't know it's their last. In the era of climate change, it can seem both incredibly prescient and bleakly quaint. Of all the breathtaking descriptions of stalking polar bears and immense ice fields, it is sobering to think that perhaps the description that has changed the least is that of the dreary corporate wasteland that is Alaska's Prudhoe Bay complex, a place where lonely men come to suck oil out of the sea and try very hard not to look around while they do it. Books like Arctic Dreams are a reminder of what happens to the land, and to us, when we fail to look closely at it.

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska.  Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside.  They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers.  They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass.  They have their own lexicon.  A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska.  The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind.  Mulchatna.  Chilikadrotna.  Unalaska.  Unalakleet.  Kivalina.  Kiska.  Kodiak.  Allakaket.  The Aniakchak Caldera.  Nondalton.  Anaktuvuk.  Anchorage.  Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans.  Its languages extend to English.  Its nature is its own.  Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked "U.S. Mail."

John McPhee's 1976 book about Alaska, Coming into the Country, is divided into three sections.  The first is about canoing the tributaries of the Kobuk River, which begins on the western coast at the city of Kotzebue.  The second is about the attempt, now aborted, to replace Juneau as the state's capital with a new city in somewhere more centrally located.  The third, title essay, and the longest, is about those who live in the bush country of the Yukon River, in old pioneer towns like Eagle and Circle, and out in subsistence-level cabins miles and miles from other human beings.  Where McPhee canoes the Kobuk is about six hundred miles from Eagle, and from Eagle to Juneau is another six hundred.  Coming into the Country is not so much about Alaska but Alaskas, the several landscapes that, when laid over the continental United States, would stretch from Florida to California.

The three essays capture a specific Alaskan moment.  It's been a state for less than two decades.  The Native Claims Act has entitled to the federal government millions of acres for the use of future national parks, none of which has been established yet.  (Two years after the book's publication, that land on the Kobuk River would become part of Kobuk Valley National Park.)  The white settlers in the title essay feel threatened by the parceling of land, and cling to the belief that by building cabins on the remote creeks that lead into the Yukon, they exert more claim to the land than the government that owns it but administers it from five thousand miles away.

McPhee sympathizes with them, and there is a kind of admirable extravagance in the settler who rails about the Fed, "They think they own this country."  In 2018, after the anti-B.L.M. terrorism of folks like Cliven Bundy, however, these views seem less charming.  But in 1976 they are emphasized by the surprising impossibility of the task of finding the perfect site for a state capital: the needs to avoid permafrost, to construct roads, to be centrally located, they eliminate so much of the state that you come away shocked by how precious land is in this wilderness.  In Eagle, a town bordered by nothing for a hundred miles in every direction, you can barely buy a plot of land.

Much has changed in Alaska since Coming into the Country was published.  McPhee's assertion that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline means that "for the first time in human history, it will be possible to drive a Winnebago--or, for that matter, a Fleetwood Cadillac--from Miami Beach to the Arctic Ocean," has proved true.  But his assertion that you would be able to drive also to Kotzebue has not.  I wonder what he would say, or Alaskans would say, about the fear that something is close to being lost with the development of Alaska:

And a very few will then jump free, going deep into the roadless world.  By the time they reach Eagle, their momentum is too great to be interrupted by an act of Congress, even if they know of it and understand what it says.  What the law now calls for is the removal of the last place in the United States where the pioneer impulse can leap from confinement.

It's a cliche, almost, to call Alaska our last frontier, but in doing so, McPhee argues that we claim something psychologically vital to our national character.  He really hates the attempt to bring to Alaska the modes and patterns of urban America, as represented by Anchorage.  He says, not quite fairly, I think: "Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders."

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I really enjoyed the ease and subtlety of McPhee's style.  He has a knack for sarcasm that's so light, you can almost miss it, and he goes out of his way to trust his reader's intelligence.  There are several moments, like this one, when he discusses a settler's pet dog Tara, who's half-wolf: "She once got out, and slit the throat of Andrea's pet dog, Lazarus.  Lazarus survived."  I love how he refuses to make the irony plain.  I can barely resist doing it now, writing this sentence.  But McPhee is so self-effacing, so eager to get out of the way that he manages to capture the size of the landscape and the peculiarity of the characters living within it with a special grace.  And when he does make himself seen, freaking out about grizzly bears, say, or meditating on the claims of the white settlers against the federal government, it comes as a small, human, surprise.

Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

But then again, this home, this property, was evidence of the glory of the land, this country.  There was so much.  There was so much space, so much land, so much to spare.  It invited the weary and the homeless like herself, her worthy children.  She had the blurry thought that all the world's searching and persecuted could find a home up here.  Alaska's climate was warming, was it not?  It would soon be a forgiving place, with milder winters and uncountable millions of unpopulated acres, and so many empty homes like this, waiting to take in the desperate travelers of the world.  It was a wonderful thought, a numbing notion.

Alaska likes to call itself The Last Frontier.  The idea is that, while every inch of the mainland United States has been domesticated, Alaska remains wild, mostly unpeopled, unseen by human eyes.  That's reflected in the lack of literature about Alaska--its more likely to attract someone like Christopher McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild, than a novelist like Dave Eggers.  It's a place for applied philosophy, not navel-gazing.

Which made it hard to find a book to bring with me on my trip to Alaska two weeks ago.  As I've said on this blog many times, I love reading books that are set in the places where I'm traveling.  But Alaska, though you might expect its distance and its mystery to be inviting subjects, has very few novels.  So when Dave Eggers released his newest novel, Heroes of the Frontier, about a woman from suburban Ohio who escapes to Alaska in an RV with her two children, I did something I never do.  I bought a hardcover book at full price.

The protagonist of Heroes of the Frontier is Josie, a dentist escaping personal and professional tragedy in Ohio.  Her practice has been sued to oblivion by a woman who developed oral cancer, and she has grown to hate the father of her children, an "invertebrate" named Carl.  And--making her decision to run unnecessarily overdetermined--she feels intense guilt over encouraging a young patient to join the military, where he died.

In response, she sets out with her young children, Paul and Ana, to Alaska, where they rent an RV.  They follow, strangely enough, the basic route that my friends and I did: beginning in Anchorage, down the Kenai Peninsula to Seward, then the town of Homer, and finally up, up through the interior toward parts unknown.  And yet I found these places, at least according to my own experience, difficult to recognize in Eggers' novel.  Eggers wants to sell us on the cleansing possibilities of the wilderness, and the idea of frontier, but he has no real feeling for the physical beauty of the Kenai Peninsula, or the staggering visual difference between the mountainous peninsula and the flat, plain-like interior.  Eggers' prose is too domestic, more Ohio than Alaska, too prosaic to match the environment.  Furthermore, he's infinitely more interested in the people Josie and her children come across, even as he claims that the emptiness of the landscape is somehow transformative.

Heroes of the Frontier is in many ways an antiquated kind of book.  It believes uncynically in the possibility of a frontier, and in the Thoreau-like ability of nature to improve us as people.  At the novel's climax, Josie and her children become stranded in a lightning storm on top of a mountain, and find their mettle to survive challenged.  She has an epiphany: instead of escaping to Alaska to find noble, courageous people, she must try to create them in her children.  And despite his attempts to equivocate--the last chapter reads simply, "But then there is tomorrow"--there's no doubt in the sincerity of the faith that Eggers places in the frontier as a place untroubled by commercialism, domestication, and modernity.  It's The Call of the Wild, but for people.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

I recall that once my favorite English teacher from high school noticed that I was reading Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, a book he admitted to having read but didn't seem to care for. "Well," he said, "I'll say this--the man knows how to spin a good yarn." It wasn't really a compliment, but I think that his sarcasm betrayed a certain notion that plot is somehow subordinate to Big Ideas. Is that notion misguided or justified? I'm not certain--but surely to dismiss Wolfe's plot-making ability as little more than quality weaving is to slight a literary skill too rare in modern literature.

Such is the recorded opinion of Michael Chabon, who admits to missing the "ripping yarns" of the genre fiction of yore. It's in that vein that he delivers The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a hulking Frankenstein's monster cobbled from bits of alternative history, Philip Marlowe novels, and Rothian postmodernism. Though YPU provides enough material philosophical and spiritual for the reader to ruminate upon, it is first and foremost a novel of things happening, meant to be marveled at. Though it may be a fruitless task, I will attempt to synopsize:

The divergence point of Chabon's alt-history is the 1948 death by car crash of Anthony Dimond, representative of the territory of Alaska to Washington. Apparently in our world it was Dimond who squashed Harold Ickes' proposal to create a protected Federal district for the temporary residence of Jews in Sitka, Alaska. In Chabon's world, the proposal passes with Dimond out of the way, and soon millions of Jews are seeking refuge in the Sitka District: The "Frozen Chosen."

Fast forward to 2008, the 60-year anniversary of the settlement, and the expiration date of the agreement, which means that "Reversion" is imminent for the Jewish district and soon most of Alaska's three million Jews will be refugees once again. If that wasn't story enough for you, Chabon layers on top of this the story of Meyer Landsman, a detective investigating a gunshot homicide perpetrated in his own building that seems to have ties to the Verbovers, a powerful and mafia-like Orthodox sect of Jews that live on a nearby island.

If that isn't enough for you, wait! I haven't even mentioned that Landsman's partner is also his cousin and half Tlingit Indian, or that his father was a chess prodigy and his uncle a former police chief disgraced by accusations of embezzlement, or that Landsman left his ex-wife because he couldn't bear dealing with the pain of having convinced her to have an abortion, or that the homicide victim is reputed to have been the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the once-in-a-generation would-be Messiah, or that the victim's death is somehow related to Landsman's sister's death in a plane crash, or that all of this seems to be tied into a shadowy conspiracy cooked up between Alaskan Hasidim and the evangelical United States president to return Israel to Jewish control. Whew. Breathe.

Clearly, The Big Sleep, this is not--Raymond Chandler's tight and careful plotting produced books under 200 pages; Chabon doubles that but stuffs in enough that it would have felt more comfortable at twice that again. But while Chabon hasn't quite got the noir genre's laconicness down pat, he does a good job with Landsman, into whom he funnels as much of Philip Marlowe's personality as is possible. The genius of this lies in the dialogue--I had never made the connection between the kind of rapid-fire quips that characterize noir and the brusque recursiveness of Jewish humor, but there it is. I am reminded of Mastrionotti and Deutsch* from the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink; it is no surprise that it is the Coens who are slated to begin filming YPU early next year.

But back to the book. Reading it feels like traveling through the legendary and labyrinthine Warsaw tunnels which run beneath Sitka, but when you emerge on the other side, what are you left with? For one, you are left with a mess. It's hard not to feel that YPU has a few ideas too many, and some of them could have been left on the cutting-room floor. For another, you are left with the unfortunate conclusion that while you weep for the fate of the Jews, for whom the Disapora comes with a countdown this time around, it is much more difficult to feel pity for the individual characters of this novel, who are drawn a little too broadly and rely a little too heavily on their archetypes.

Thirdly, you may be left with the opinion of Richard Johnson of the New York Post, who titles his Page Six piece "Novelist's Ugly Views of Jews." This is, of course, the Post, which could sensationalize a ham sandwich, but I wish to briefly unpack the criticism here: Mainly Johnson takes issue with the fact that YPU "depicts Jews as constantly in conflict with one another, and its villains are a ruthless, ultra-Orthodox sect that resembles the Lubavitchers." What exactly is Johnson's understanding of Judaism today, that its various sects are friendly in a way that the splinter denominations of Islam and Christianity have failed to be since their inception? In fact, I think that Chabon's depiction of internecine conflict among the Sitka Jews is one of the novel's great successes; in a population of three million Jews with no Palestinians to brush against (though the native Indians serve this position to some extent), isn't it natural that such issues would arise along sectarian and secular lines? Johnson's criticism is pure silliness, and I have not seen it repeated by any respectable source.

And yet, let me bring up something that Johnson does not: One of the most poisonous and absurd claims made about Jews today is that they have extensive control over world institutions like the media and the United States Government. This idea is particularly pervasive in Islamic communities and the controversial specter of it taints even serious academic work, like Mearsheimer and Walt's claims about the undue influence of the Israel Lobby. By presenting a "ripping yarn" in which a cabal of Orthodox Jews plot to undermine the stability of world events, isn't Chabon playing into the hands of such absurdity? And even if the Post is too dim to pick up on it, doesn't that in a way back up their claims that YPU reinforces an ugly stereotype?

That question is more rhetorical than it sounds; I bring up the issue only to bring it up and would probably argue against it in the end. But I do think that it contributes to one aspect that did leave a bad taste in my mouth: YPU, for all its concern with religious issues, seems at times to have a rather uncomplex attitude toward religion in general. Though we might argue about the significance of it, the villains of the novel are conspiratorial Jews--and its heroes are humorous, self-effacing, Woody Allen-like ones--and what's more, they're aided by an amoral and evangelical president who wants to bring on the End Times. Though I understand this is the perception many have of our sitting president, it seems to me to evidence a certain lack of nuance on Chabon's part. There is no worth, I believe, in fiction that does not subvert our expectations, and while Chabon distracts us with the aurora borealis of conceit and plot, the cast lacks the capability to surprise us.

Don't think that I'm not recommending the book, I am--sometimes a good story is good enough. Let us not forget that one of the most powerful people in Jewish Sitka is Itzak Zimbalist, the boundary maven. It is against Jewish law to carry anything across boundaries on the Sabbath, a law circumvented by creating makeshift boundaries with rope, cable or wire around entire communities, and it is the boundary maven who is in charge of keeping this border, the eruv, intact. So do not doubt the power of string, the effectiveness of a "good yarn."

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

I think this is the newest book I've ever read. He published it this May, and the cover is the main reason that I absolutely had to have it. This is the first in a series of reviews I'm doing called "my birthday presents."

This is the second of Chabon's books I've read, so my expectations were set pretty high. Unfortunately, it's hard to measure up to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Basically the premise for this book is an actual Senate proposal from the 1940s that, should the Jews lose Israel in WWII, the USA would give them a piece of Alaska. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Jews from Israel, Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, and other parts of Europe have all migrated to the newly created Sitka District of Alaska. Chabon never actually goes says how the war ended, or what the political situation is in Europe now, he just lets readers guess at that, I suppose. It's set in the early 21st century, and the District is about to be revoked, meaning that the last of the world's Jews will have nowhere to go in two months from the novel's opening. The story follows Sitka District Detective Meyer Landsman, who is one of my new favorite characters (Chabon also wrote another of my favorites, Joe Kavalier). He's basically an embellished stereotype: the washed-up, renegade cop who doesn't play by the rules. But Chabon manages to make him a lot more human than that; he's easy to sympathize with. Landsman sets about solving a murder that shows up in the dingy hotel he's been living in, which turns out to be a case much bigger than he originally thought.

Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.

"That's right," Zimbalist says at last. "Mendel Shpilman. The only son. He had a twin brother who was born dead. Later, that was interpreted as a sign."

The whole book is wildly imaginative, full of Yiddish puns that I really didn't understand (if you know why a Shoyfer should be a name for a cell phone, please tell me), and a few that I did (a restaurant named "Hands of Esau"). It was a great tribute to 1940s noir, with everyone in porkpie hats, smoking like chimneys and solving crimes involving Russian mobsters. The dark and gritty noir feel meshed strangely well with the Yiddish puns and snappy dialogue. Unfortunately, at times, the gimmick got in the way of the story. Having such a far-fetched setting has to be incredibly hard to pull of (David Mitchell managed it with Cloud Atlas unbelievably well). The book lost steam towards the middle, landing in an uncomfortable zone where it was too realistic to be surreal, but too far-fetched to feel believable. It picked back up at the end, and was a great, unique read. I'm still a Chabon fan.